Thursday

Aug 16, 2018 at 11:50 AMAug 18, 2018 at 5:22 PM

Amid a bevy of overcast blockbusters, adolescent girls have cast a sliver of sun on the summer movie season in the acclaimed trio of “Hereditary,” “Leave No Trace” and “Eighth Grade.” And to close out the slate, two more teen-centric offerings on post-pubescent angst arrive in the form of “Skate Kitchen” and “Never Goin’ Back.” Neither is in the same league as the other three, but there are pleasures to be had in watching ambitious girls vie for equality.

In the better of the two, “Never Goin’ Back” deals exclusively in audaciousness in following the R-rated exploits of two emancipated 16-year-olds from Texas recklessly negotiating a series of roadblocks on the way to raising enough cash to make their share of the rent. The twist is that their potty-mouthed swagger far exceeds their brainpower. But what these high-school dropouts lack in smarts is more than compensated by resourcefulness. If there’s a time conflict between doing their laundry and attending a drug-and-alcohol blowout at a friend’s house, they’ll find a way to do both simultaneously.

Clearly, stars Maia Mitchell and Camila Morrone are a decade too old for their roles, but that’s part of the goof writer-director Augustine Frizzell is having with us in satirizing the credulity-straining precociousness of the male protagonists we see in most other teens-behaving-badly movies. It’s as if she’s out to prove girls can be just as oversexed and feckless as the boys. And Mitchell’s Angela and Morrone’s Jessie are certainly that in employing their bodies and their wiles to compensate for their severe lack of cash.

Instead of using the extra wages they earn at their dead-end waitressing jobs to get a place of their own away from Jessie’s stupid, wannabe drug-dealer brother, Dustin (Joel Allen), they invest their money on a beach rental in Galveston, where they plan to mark Jessie’s 17th birthday in style. They practically embrace their obliviousness until reality hits when Dustin’s latest botched drug deal lands them, not him, in jail. How they overcome this dilemma is something you never want your daughters to see out of fear it might give them larcenous ideas. But that doesn’t mean you won’t laugh at the girls’ zany exploits, most of which come at the expense of their other housemate, Brandon, a fast-food counter jockey played with clueless bravado by “SNL’s” Kyle Mooney.

Morrone and Mitchell (a dead-ringer for “The O.C.”-era Rachel Bilson) are certainly an engaging pair with chemistry to burn, which makes it all the more unfortunate that Augustine, the wife of “Pete’s Dragon” director David Lowery, burdens them with copious amounts of toilet humor. If the goal was to prove pretty girls poop, too, mission accomplished, but why must it come at the expense of our intellect? Still, if you check your brain at the door, there’s a reasonable good time to be had.

Sadly, that’s not the case for “Skate Kitchen,” a leaden depiction of a pack of New Yawk girls out to prove they can break their necks doing the same stupid skateboard tricks the boys do. It’s directed by Crystal Moselle, who brings the same air of phony “reality” she brought to her overhyped documentary “The Wolfpack.” Instead of a septuplet of feral boys and girls allegedly held prisoner for years by their weirdo dad in their New York City apartment, this time we get the soul of an 18-year-old girl held captive by her overprotective single mom.

The only difference is that in this instance it’s openly scripted (by Moselle, Aslihan Unaldi and Jen Silverman), but every bit as disingenuous. The gimmick is that all the actors are amateurs boarders, including Jaden Smith (sorry, I couldn’t resist), moonlighting from their day jobs as sk8er goils pounding their heads into the pavement practicing dangerous stunts. The real-life leader of the skateboarders, discovered by Moselle on the streets of her hometown, is the enigmatic Rachelle Vinberg, which I guess automatically qualifies her to play the lead, an overly mothered Long Islander named Camille.

The girl’s whole world revolves around her skateboard, but one day when she slips and “credit cards” her genitals, her mother (Elizabeth Rodriguez) says no more and tosses the offending inanimate object out the car window. But that’s not going to stop Camille, who devises a clandestine plan to take the train into Manhattan whenever Mom is at her nursing job. There she meets up with a half-dozen other teenage girls who share her boarding hobby. They bond by sharing a joint, discussing boys, girls and their sexual attractions to both. A couple of them even exchange passionate kisses. But Camille lost me when she claims to have never used or seen a tampon before.

Much screen time is wasted on her introduction to this newfangled contraption that she clumsily tries to figure out how to insert. At least that bit of humor is preferable to the monotony of her budding romance with Smith. He may be the son of the Fresh Prince of Bel Air, but the kid is more like the Stale Pauper of Mediocrity. He and Vinberg generate zero heat and the love triangle that emerges between them and Camille’s new Manhattan roommate, Janay (Ardelia Lovelace, the best thing in the movie), is the stuff of afterschool specials.

The skateboarding scenes, shot by director of photography Shabier Kirchner, are thrilling eye candy, but the script is pure pap dealing in alienated-teen clichés and rote romantic machinations. But it’s the film’s utter lack of authenticity that is its downfall.

Moselle might be the only filmmaker out there able to make real people seem fake. It happened with “The Wolfpack” and it happens here. In fact, her film is so mannered it makes the outrageous exploits of the girls in “Never Goin’ Back” look like true life. But keep an eye out for Lovelace. Like Chloe Sevigny in Larry Clark’s similarly all-amateur teen-sploitation piece, “Kids” (1995), Lovelace is a real discovery whose previously untapped talent can take her far; or, at least farther than any skateboard.